Gail Sheehy was present at the creation — or nearly so. I speak of the creation of the “gang that wouldn’t write straight,” as the literary journalists of the 1960s were once called. We’re talking about Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson — all of the usual suspects.
Sheehy was there, writing breakthrough nonfiction for New York magazine and edging toward a breakthrough in her wholly owned and operated sub-genre of literary journalism, the psychological explorations of Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life.
Now, Sheehy has produced Daring: My Passages (Morrow, $29.99), a memoir of her career, her literary breakthrough and her long relationship and eventual marriage with Clay Felker. Felker, founder and editor of New York, was one of the two editing gods of this explosion of creative nonfiction. (The other was Harold Hayes of Esquire.)
Sheehy began as Felker’s protégé and was with him for 40 years, finally becoming his wife and caretaker as he suffered a long, slow slide toward death. She dealt with this in her 2010 book Passages in Caregiving.
Sheehy’s story is captivating and offers a lot of backstage stories about the New York magazine gang and its eventually loss of the magazine to Rupert Murdoch. But Sheehy and Felker always managed to endure. We learn a little more than we really want to know about life in the Sheehy-Felker household — TMI! — but Sheehy is nothing if not forthcoming about the struggles of public life and a house populated by genius.
MUSICIANS ON MUSICIANS: Chicago Review Press began its Musicians in Their Own Words series some years back with Coltrane on Coltrane. These volumes collect magazine interviews, transcripts of radio chats and memoirs to create loose-jointed autobiographies of these artists.
Led Zeppelin on Led Zeppelin, edited by Hank Bordowitz, is the latest in the series and shows a softer side of the quintessential “heavy” band of the early 1970s. Much of the book focuses on guitarist Jimmy Page and vocalist Robert Plant, who emerge as sensitive and articulate, not the groupie-ravaging louts they were portrayed as when young.
Bordowitz must've used a Wayback Machine to travel backwards in time and find some of these interviews in obscure little fanzines. He begins the story with Page's hiring as the bassist then lead guitarist of the Yardbirds, a bluesy entry in the army of the British Invasion led by The Beatles. Eric Clapton started his career with the Yardbirds but quit when the band had the bad taste to earn a No. 1 record ("For Your Love.") Clapton saw himself as a blues purist and did not want to be part of a commercial enterprise. Jeff Beck then took over his first-guitar chair, then came Page, who soon became bandleader. As the personnel changed and Beck left, Page was captain of the ship. With all new personnel, he began calling the group The New Yardbirds. After one tour, that group became Led Zeppelin.
Like the band or hate it, it has one of the best stories and lineages in rock n' roll history.
Earlier this year, Jeff Burger produced the collection Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen, which is sharply literate, as you might expect of the subject. What surprises, considering Cohen’s uber-serious persona, is the warmth and humor that comes through in these interviews and encounters.
Burger edited last year’s Springsteen on Springsteen, a terrific collection of interviews with the Boss. Bruce Springsteen has always been a great, thoughtful interview and is often at his most articulate in these drive-bys with journalists.
This is a great series devoted to musicians who are not only among the best in the field, but also the most interesting and eloquent when speaking about the art of songwriting.
Speaking of Leonard Cohen: A Broken Hallelujah (Norton, $25.95) by Liel Leibovitz is a great companion to the Cohen on Cohen book. It’s less a biography of the poet-singer, and more a meditation on his art and what it’s meant to our culture in the last half century.
MAN IN THE SHADOWS: Bless Joel Selvin for writing Here Comes the Night (Counterpoint, $25), the story of Bert Berns. Berns was the man behind so many great rock songs, including "Twist and Shout," "Hang on Sloopy," "Piece of My Heart," "Here Comes the Night" and "Brown-Eyed Girl," among many others. Neither Van Morrison nor Neil Diamond would have had their careers without this guy. (We can forgive Berns for giving us Neil Diamond. No one's perfect, after all.)
The book has lots of good inside-baseball on the 1960s music industry. Anyone who was anyone in rock n' roll during that period makes at least a cameo appearance in the book.
But this is a thoroughly researched and beautifully written story of a man largely unknown outside music-world geekdom. It's a brilliant testament to a talent that was gone too soon.
A former faculty member at the University of Florida, William McKeen now chairs the journalism department at Boston University. He is the author most recently of Mile Marker Zero, Outlaw Journalist and Homegrown in Florida.
This article appears in Dec 4-10, 2014.